We live in a democracy and many Christians are pleased that we elected Donald Trump. He pledged to make us “Great”.  The danger of democracy is, that we all share the blame and the consequences of our Governments rule in our name.  Literally ‘democracy’ comes from the Greek ‘demokratia,’ and may be translated as the rule of the common people (‘demos’ means ‘common people’ and ‘Kratos’ means rule or strength).

As the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, we have a responsibility to mankind. This United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all….is on track to collide with the values and the concerns of the Creator of all men.

In ancient Jewish literature, there are many references to Sodom. The phrase “middat Sdom” was used. It may be translated as “the way the people of Sodom thought”. It meant a lack of charity and hospitality towards others; ignoring the needs of the poor, etc. In the Middle East, a person’s survival could depend upon the charity of strangers. To help strangers was a solemn religious duty of paramount importance.

Isaiah 1; The entire first chapter is an utter condemnation of Judah. They are repeatedly compared with Sodom and Gomorrah in their evildoing and depravity. Throughout the chapter, the Prophet lists many sins of the people: … being unjust and oppressive to others, being insensitive to the needs of widows and orphans, committing murder, accepting bribes, etc.

Ezekiel 16:49-50:”Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.” God states clearly that he destroyed Sodom’s sins because of their pride, their excess of food while the poor and needy suffered; sexual activity is not even mentioned.

Our new budget calls for a 10% increase in defense spending ($54 Billion) at the expense of UN food aid. The largest humanitarian crisis since World War 2 is looming in Africa. The lack of humanitarian access in Somalia and conflict in Sudan, South Sudan, and Eritrea has resulted in an influx of refugees into Ethiopia. The refugee camp at Dadaab, located close to the Kenyan border with Somalia, was originally designed in the early 1990s to accommodate 90,000 people but the UN estimates over 4 times as many reside there. The ongoing civil war in Somalia and the worst drought to affect the Horn of Africa in six decades has resulted in an estimated 12 million people whose lives are threatened. The total number of refugees and asylum seekers has made Ethiopia the largest refugee-hosting country in Africa…and they can barely feed themselves. The millions that face starvation is larger than the Ukrainian famine, the Cambodian famine, and the Irish famine combined.

This punitive gutting of food aid makes up only a microscopic part of the US budget. It costs less than a new jet – and only buys sacks of corn meal….the kind that obese and intoxicated Americans feed their animals and would never stoop to eat.

In 2011  40% of the U.S. corn crop was diverted to make fuel for cars. Ethanol uses 4.9 billion bushels of corn in the U.S. That was enough grain to feed 350 million people. Seems biofuel and ethanol paid more as Govt incentives redirected corn/wheat into ethanol production. So we filled the tanks of our cars with subsidized ethanol at the expense of the very hungry poor.

American farmers cashed their checks and Egyptians, Libyans, Algerians, and Mexicans rioted over the price of their bread/tacos/tortillas. Raising their basic food prices along with our efforts to destabilize the Middle East was our “gift” with political motives. The Arab Spring was the chance for the “rule of the common people”  and left six countries in ruin and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Islamic State of Libya in charge…before chaos. Food is a weapon more powerful than oil.

It is Passover next week and another crowd once chanted “Crucify Him”  His blood be on us and our children. They understood the responsibility of democracy.

This Passover we will gather for our Seders and our Easter festivities…collectively having sentenced millions of people to death. They are black and brown and we will never get close enough to smell that smell or hear the rasp of a starving baby.

• We too will ask for a bowl and a towel.  
• 
• It won’t be to wash their feet…..
• It will be our hands we wash as we proclaim ourselves innocent of their blood.

Since I was not born in America I was afforded the benefit of a British schooling in Africa. Our history lessons included European history and the rise and fall of great empires. Now living and working as a citizen of the United States, we talk about OLD houses that are only 50 years old. In Britain, the city of Bath was established in the 1st Century by the Romans, in Europe an old house is 700 years old, and in Jerusalem, they date back to the Crusades…. 700 years before America was even settled.

The great business leaders that made America great are Astor, Rockefeller, DuPont, J.P. Morgan with roots that are less than 200 years old. In 1308 some 700 years ago, the Frescobaldi’s were wool traders and bankers and they financed King Edwards wars both in Wales and in France. The family, which also built Florence’s first bridge Santa Trinita also became one of the main composers of keyboard music during the late Renaissance and early Baroque periods.

The Bank of Italy compared the tax records of Florentine taxpayers of 1427 to track the mobility of social economic status across the centuries. All that long before Columbus ever sailed.

We look with pride on Harvard (1693) and Yale (1701) and Princeton (1747) Ivy League schools that trace their roots back to the first Great Awakening that swept the East Coast. The word university comes from the Latin: Universitas – which was coined at the foundation of the University of Bologna in Italy in 1088. In 1158, the Emperor Frederick Barber also settled the rules, rights, and privileges of universities. Back then Italy was part of the Holy Roman Empire. The University of Oxford in the Kingdom of England was founded between 1096 and 1167, but it was not until 1254 that Pope Innocent the fourth granted Oxford University, a charter by papal bull. I guess our schools missed some 700 years of early education.

Our largest Protestant denomination is the Baptists with a long history extending all the way back to 1845 and the Southern Baptist Convention. The Catholic Church held sway over all of Europe and crowned its Kings and its Emperors a thousand years before….The old line confessions of the Reformation that are the roots of Lutheran and the Westminster confession are 200 years older than America. The 500 year anniversary of the Reformation is this October 2017 and the Catholics and the Lutherans and the Anglicans are planning a wonderful reunion as the mother church embraces her errant daughters.

So what is my point?
We are the illegitimate offspring of no lineage that stumbled onto a continent and found the winning lottery ticket. In the last 80 years, we became the most ignorant, most obese, entitled people squandering the world’s resources at an unprecedented rate.

We are thrilled and hypnotized with our latest technological gizmo. Like most lottery winners, we have bought depreciating cars and lead the world in drug addiction, divorce, illegitimate births, abortion, porn production and consumption, depression, and the highest number of incarcerated citizens on the planet.

We have remained too drunk to realize we can’t read or write, have no sense of history, and our biggest political concern is who is allowed in which bathroom.

Like most lottery winners we have racked up the world’s largest national debt and bankrupted ourselves with pouring trillions of dollars in failed “Nouveau riche” (French: ‘new rich’) schemes to export our democracy.

Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar already recognized Afghanistan would not be changed. If our schools included history we would have recognized neither Greece, Rome, Genghis Kahn, the British nor the Russians ever defeated and subdued Afghanistan. She has been called the graveyard of empires…but we won the lottery…..so our money can change what 1000 years could not?

Europe is not ignorant of her history and her monuments and her old buildings are reminders of her ancient roots. Nationalism is awakening all over Europe and the E.U. is done. Europe is beginning to realize that the United States (which has no history and no character) is only about consumerism and self-protection. Like most “friends” on a drunken bar hopping spree, they tend to leave when the U.S.A. can no longer pick up the tab for the next round of cool-aid……

There is a new world order coming, and the United States is no longer the center of the world. Like a cherry tree in the coming hurricane, she will be blown over by the wind of History. America will be replaced by a tree planted in Europe long ago, with deep roots, reaching all the way back to Rome, Greece, and Babylon.

God also has a view of history and it also stretches back to 2000BC when He called a man out of Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization. Babylon, that area between the Tigris and the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq.

God has also appointed a King to return and take up His throne. Those two world orders, who both trace their roots back to Babylon, (the cradle of civilization) will clash at the center of the world. Jerusalem.

The people of God need a worldview and a global perspective to look beyond bathroom politics, immigration, and taxation. There are bigger matters at hand according to the God who writes history.

The end time powers will once again be prophets and kings. Our happy feel good “scampering before the Lord” in playful worship in church, is not going to sustain us in the time ahead. As the people of God, we need to sober up, put down our small screen device, and realize there is a war coming.